Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

From BBC.com:

Rising concentrations of greenhouse gases may have more serious impacts than previously believed, a major scientific report has said.

The report, published by the UK government, says there is only a small chance of greenhouse gas emissions being kept below "dangerous" levels...

The report, Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change, collates evidence presented by scientists at a conference hosted by the UK Meteorological Office in February 2005...

The report asked scientists to calculate which greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere would be enough to cause these "dangerous" temperature increases.

Currently, the atmosphere contains about 380 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas, compared to levels before the industrial revolution of about 275ppm.

To have a good chance of achieving the EU's two-degree target, levels should be stabilised at 450ppm or below, the report concludes.

This conference represents a broad consensus of climate scientists. Let's be clear on this as well as all other aspects of the global warming debate. The idea that global warming is occurring and is occurring due to human activity is a scientific theory. That means it has been hypothesized and has been tested by making predictions and seeing if those predictions are true. Doubters will say that global warming is "just" a theory and has not been proven. That shows a misunderstanding of the scientific process. A theory is as good as it gets in science. Our understanding of gravity is a theory. The original theory of gravitation, formulated by Isaac Newton, was and is a wonderful theory that can be used for most applications. But Albert Einstein found that it was, under certain circumstances, flawed and he modified it to make it accurate under a wider range of circumstances.

That's science. A theory is never definitively and forever proven. It is tested and either supported or refuted. So far, the theory that humans are causing climate change on earth has received considerable support. Doesn't make it proven. But it makes it a robust theory. Which is why large conferences like the one mentioned above can come to broad conclusions even though there is still considerable debate about the DETAILS of global warming.

In other words, about 90% of all climatologists agree on the broad outlines of global warming: that it is happening, that it is a much more rapid rate than ever seen before and that it is being caused by human activity. Within that broad consensus there is considerable debate, but that broad outline is clear.

I recently wrote about the so-called "Intelligent Deception" lobby that is pretty much willing to do anything to fight the teaching of evolution no matter how robust a theory it is because it contradicts their own personal dogma. I have also recently written about the robustness of the anthropogenic global warming theory and the foolishness of ignoring it.

And yet James Hansen, who directs NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, the institute where my wife studies, has the following to say about how our government is treating climate research: (I am quoting dKos quoting Washington Post)

``They're trying to control what's getting out to the public,'' Hansen said, adding that many of his colleagues are afraid to talk about the issue. ``They're not willing to say much because they've been pressured and they're afraid they'll get into trouble.''

Which leads me to the denial lobby. There are people who deny the existence of global warming. Or, more exactly, they play an odd game of denial where they start be denying the existence of global warming, then say that even if it does exist it isn't caused by carbon dioxide and even if it is caused by carbon dioxide it is not caused by people. In other words they try to deny all levels of the theory without realizing that their own arguments contradict each other. This lobby of denial also seems apt to deception. They make claims that really are not supported by scientific analysis.

Don't get me wrong. Healthy skepticism is a critical part of the scientific process, and ALL levels of any theory need to be tested and retested. But, that skepticism has to be applied EQUALLY to one's own theories as well as to the theories of others. The Denial Lobby tend to use a small number of minor or dubious studies to cast doubt on a much larger number of studies conducted by much better respected scientists published in better journals. In other words, their skepticism of the global warming hypothesis is not equally applied to the studies that disagree with the global warming hypothesis. They seem very interested in one particular conclusion, so they are more accepting of studies that support their desired conclusion. That is NOT scientific.

This willful ignorance regarding the reality of global warming is another front in the right wing Intelligent Deception campaign. And it is making the United States a laughing stock around the world because of our anti-Science leadership. Again from BBCnews:

In his final speech as president of the Royal Society, Lord May of Oxford will say scientists must speak out against the climate change "denial lobby...

"Ahead of us lie dangerous times," he will say in his fifth and final anniversary address.

"There are serious problems that derive from the realities of the external world: climate change, loss of biological diversity, new and re-emerging diseases, and more.

"Many of these threats are not yet immediate, yet their non-linear character is such that we need to be acting today.

"And we have no evolutionary experience of acting on behalf of a distant future; we even lack basic understanding of important aspects of our own institutions and societies.

"Sadly, for many, the response is to retreat from complexity and difficulty by embracing the darkness of fundamentalist unreason."

Lord May will say that fundamentalism applies not only to organised religions but to lobby groups on both sides of the climate change debate.

The climate change "denial lobby" and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) opposed to nuclear power are not exempt from a denial or misrepresentation of scientific facts, he told reporters in London...

Another danger to the enlightenment of science came from the growing network of fundamentalist and lobby groups in the US that campaigned for creationism to be taught in science classes, he added.

"By their own writings, this group has a much wider agenda which is to replace scientific materialism by something more based on faith," he said.

He called on scientists to take a more active role in speaking out against so-called "intelligent design" and other threats to modern scientific values.

"The only thing I can see scientists doing is being more energetic as citizens - getting out there and trying to convince people that that's not a very wise way to behave," he explained. "That's no easy recipe."

Right wing America is engaged in a campaign of Intelligent Deception and is supported by the "denial lobby" in its efforts to ignore reality. Evolution is a cornerstone of modern science, supported by ample evidence. And global warming is an observed reality whose occurrence is so closely correlated with increased atmospheric carbon dioxide, which, in turn, is so closely correlated with increased human generation of carbon dioxide, that the idea that human activity is increasing global temperatures is a blatantly obvious place to look for the explanation for climate change.

Let me review the global warming debate. First off, climate IS changing. The Arctic is melting. The Antarctic ice sheet is thinning and breaking up. Glaciers are receding at a record rate...and that is record for all of known geological history, not just recorded history. And the Siberian permafrost is thawing...becoming only seasonally frozen. The scale and rate of these changes is mindboggling. You can find a summary of the myriad signs of global warming on the Union of Concerned Scientists website. Some members of the denial lobby deny even the fact that climate is changing. That becomes harder and harder as glaciers recede and ice sheets break up.

The second thing the deniers will claim is that climate changes all the time naturally. Climate change is indeed always going on as solar output fluctuates, orbits wobble, etc. Some will point out the Medieval warm period and the Little Ice Age to show that climate fluctuates without human intervention. This is a red herring because NO ONE denies that climate fluctuated naturally. These changes can be slow or fast, but there is no evidence as far back as scientists can go with ice cores for a change as rapid as what we are seeing now on Earth. So we have an unprecedented phenomenon that requires explanation.

For a while there was some uncertainty in this because two measurements disagreed. The gist of the debate was whether surface or tropospheric measurements were more accurate because these two measurements disagreed as to whether temperatures are rising. You have probably mostly seen the dramatic rise in surface temperatures. Satellite measurements had shown far less warming in the troposhere even though models suggest that the surface and troposphere should pretty much warm together. Obviously, the right wing oil whores have seized on this to claim global warming is still not known to be really happening.

Reinterpretation by Fu, et. al. in Nature 429, 55-58 (6 May 2004 of the data has solved this by realizing that the interpretation of the tropospheric temperatures were inaccurate. This reinterpretation was further supported by the work of Gillett, et. al. in Nature 432, (2 December 2004). So this disagreement has largely been resolved, though there are a handful of scientists who still debate it. But it is hard to deny that there is a warming trend given the massive changes in glaciation and ice sheet size. All of these correlations are in agreement. Correlation does not imply causation, but correlations are how one BEGINS to find causation. So we have what look like the effects of warming (these are undeniable). And we have evidence from surface measurements that show undeniably a warming. And we have measurements from the troposphere that most scientists agree show a similar warming as the surface measurements. Melting ice implies warming, and warming has been found. Those are two steps in the logical chain. Now we need to find what might be causing warming.

We know for a fact that carbon dioxide and other gasses have a greenhouse effect. That is physics and cannot be disputed. Our most basic understanding of the atmospheres of Venus, Earth and Mars are based on this "greenhouse effect" of some gasses. So, one hypothesis is that an increase in greenhouse gasses is to blame. So, to test this, scientists looked for an increase in greenhouse gasses.

And they found it. There has been a CLEAR and ACCELERATING increase in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere. Furthermore BOTH increasing temperatures AND increasing greenhouse gasses VERY CLOSELY CORRELATE. That means a graph of the increased carbon dioxide has the exact shape and timing of a graph of increased temperature. This is the famous "hockey stick" graph. Some will dispute the hockeystick modeal, saying that there have been other warm periods in the past. Again, this is a red herring. NO ONE DISPUTES the fact that fluctuation has occurred in the past. Even within the coldest ice ages there are warm periods. It is the RAPID increase in AVERAGE temperature that is the hockey stick. AND it correlates well with the rise in greenhouse gasses caused by human activity. So right here we know from physics and planetary sciences what effect increased greenhouse gasses will have and we are seeing that predicted effect. This is not controversy, this is proof of principle.

Some deniers will say that water vapor is also a greenhouse gas and is a stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. This is correct but they go on to say that water vapor is ignored in global warming studies. This second part is false. It is so false that it is hard for me to believe that it isn't an intentional deception. Studying the effects of water vapor on climate change is one of the most active aspects of global warming research and is the focus of my wife's research. But a blind faith that studying water vapor will make it all okay is also wrong. The deniers are currently putting all of their hope into water vapor, but in general the work on water vapor is NOT helping their cause.

Let me take an example. Richard Lindzen (at MIT) is one of the Denial Lobby's pet scientists. I believe Richard Lindzen is likely to be a legitimate scientist who is honestly trying to disprove the standard global warming model. Dr. Lindzen's main line of inquiry is looking at the effects of water vapor and clouds in the tropics on warming. Again, I think Dr. Lindzen is an honest skeptic, though I must also point out that he is connected with the Cato Review of Business & Government, so may not be completely unbiased. But a much bigger problem with Dr. Lindzen's claims. He has a bad track record when it comes to proposing hypotheses. His initial claims regarding water vapor and clouds at the tropics (essentially a tropical drying mechanism that would cool the earth in response to warming) were disproved by other climatologists when they actually did more detailed studies on water vapor and clouds. For example:

Some global warming naysayers, most notably Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had questioned the water vapor feedback mechanism, speculating that atmospheric circulation patterns in the tropics could dry, rather than moisten, the upper troposphere. If this were true, a given increase in heat-trapping pollution would produce far less global warming than projected by current climate models. Lindzen's tropospheric drying hypothesis, however, is clearly rejected by the study made by Brian Soden of the University of Miami and colleagues at the University of Colorado, Princeton and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Using satellite measurements of infrared radiation originating from water vapor in the upper troposphere, these researchers found that the amount of water vapor in that critical zone increased between 1982 and 2004, in accordance with climate model simulations. The results are consistent with constant relative humidity and inconsistent with Lindzen's suggestion of upper tropospheric drying. This finding eliminates what was perhaps the most fundamental challenge to mainstream global warming projections.

In other words, the very area where deniers claim most climatologists aren't paying enough attention to was used to disprove the initial hypotheses of their favorite scientist. Water vapor and clouds do not save the deniers nor do they destroy the anthropogenic theory of climate change. Dr. Lindzen has revamped his hypotheses in light of his initial failures and continues to be the gadfly arguing against 90% of climatologists. Good for him. His new hypothesis regarding water vapor and cloud cover negating the model of 90% of climatologists has not yet been properly tested so yet remains a viable hypothesis. We do need a few gadflies. But their existence and their hypotheses do not negate the studies of 90% of climatologists which support the theory that increasing temperatures are caused by increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because of human activity. Skepticism is good, but to throw out 90% of what climatologists believe based on the so far poor track record of the remaining 10% is not proper science. Skepticism has to be applied to 100% of climatologists, particularly those who are in the minority.

So we see evidence of warming. We find measurements at the surface AND in the troposphere (with some doubters) indicate a warming and indicate that warming is happening with unprecedented rapidity. We know from planetary sciences that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. We know humans have been engaging in rapid deforestation of the planet and have been burning fossil fuels at an increasing rate, thus releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by two mechanisms. We know that the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide closely matches what one would expect from the release of carbon dioxide humans have been causing. Given the known release of carbon dioxide we have been doing, and given the known effect atmospheric carbon dioxide has on global temperature, the famous "hockey stick" graph showing the correlation between the two is NOT really surprising. We KNOW more carbon dioxide leads to warming and we KNOW that we are putting more carbon dioxide into the air so why do we pretend to be surprised that we are causing warming? Throwing water vapor into the debate does not change things based on current studies.

The majority of the predictions that atmospheric scientists predicted a decade ago have been coming to pass. That really means that the hypothesis of global warming is a solid scientific theory because it has been successfully predictive. It also means that the deniers have yet to explain those predictions if they want to deny that warming is happening. Scientists predicted increased storminess (we have had a record hurricane season this year and many years have shown increased storminess recently), the northward spread of tropical diseases (West Nile, for example!), melting glaciers (in full swing from the alps to Mt. Kilamanjaro), the break up of the Antarctic ice sheet (which began dramatically a couple of years ago), the melting of the permafrost (just starting), etc. All of this was predicted based on the theory of global warming and all of it is coming true.

Yet big oil companies, out of sheer, unadulterated greed, have formed the "lobby for the denial of science" in order to make Americans ignorant of global warming so that they can continue to profit from fossil fuels. One of the people who contacted me to express the "skeptics" viewpoint and claimed he was a "colleague" of one of the scientists who contacted me writes for a coal industry trade journal. Not an unbiased skeptic the way he claims. The Republican Party has become the pawn of the "lobby for the denial of science" as well as the political wing for the religious fundamentalist "Intelligent Deception" movement. The Republican Party has led the way in the fight against reality and for a psychotic denial of facts. Republicans like the corrupt and callous Joe Barton (TX-6) have led the political fight in favor of denial and deception. Barton has even tried blatant intimidation of the most famous American global warming scientists by threatening their funding and calling into question their scientific integrity. A corrupt Republican calling into question the integrity of scientists! The Bush Administration and large segments of the Republican Party are playing the intelligent deceiver, deceiving America to get their way. Republicans wrap themselves in Christianity and declare Crusades and act as the political front for greedy corporations and religious extremists. In the process they subjugate fact to belief. They suppress scientific evidence showing that global warming is upon us here and now in their belief that what is good for big oil companies is good for America. They suppress evidence that world fisheries are declining in their belief that deregulation of fisheries is a good thing. They suppress evidence for the harmful effects of mercury and arsenic on children in their belief that deregulation of environmental standards is a good thing. They suppress facts about the Iraq War in their belief that it is a Crusade that will make America strong.

It is impractical and intellectually dishonest to, as the Bush administration and the Republican Party have been doing, try and deceive the entire world to push an agenda of faith, whether that faith is in neocon ideology or Christian fundamentalism. Our nation, built to be a place where all religions and beliefs are allowed, was never intended to favor ANY belief over common sense facts.

I call upon Americans to reject the reactionary anti-intellectualism of the Republican Party for a revival of science, common sense and an emphasis on facts. I think a good place to start is to focus hard on defeating Joe Barton, the Republican front man for the war on global warming scientists. go to my "Defeat the Katrina 11" website and donate to the general fund for the TX-6 race. I suspect that this race will be a sleeper for awhile, but will get hot in the last weeks of the campaign in 2006. That would parallel the OH-2 race. But this time we really have a chance to give this race some early attention. Please keep an eye on it and give when you can! There is an excellent Democrat, David Harris, running against Barton. David Harris now has his website up if you want to read more about him. For those who are interested in more on the scientific issues, the Union of Concerned Scientists addresses all of these issues, from evolution to environment to energy issues. The National Center for Science Education focuses on evolution and protecting education from creationists. Finally, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State focuses on keeping America the secular, rationalist nation that the Founding Fathers intended it to be. Please join in the fight against the Intelligent Deceivers.